Indiana Joe and the Quest for the Ultimate Plugins Folder

[BartonThinks 3,416]

6 hours ago, Indiana Joe said:

Alright I've jumped off the deep end.  I want to customize every single tile set, for the ultimate amount of control.

Here's the beginning of an outline for low density, with Maxis examples.  For much of this density, the setting is what really matters more to me than the architecture, since I want it all to look North American anyway.

 

And then I have a spreadsheet for custom content links, based on what might fit where.

 

...which you can view here.

 

But oh, if only it were so easy.  You browse the exchanges, you find an awesome BAT...and it just doesn't fall into your categories neatly.  Not to mention how unbalanced the available variety is:

• Low wealth: severely lacking.  Mostly falls into the low-density "rural" category. R$ small-medium density is needed.  I may need to re-assign some existing BATs.
• Medium wealth: hugely over-saturated.  Very difficult to split up.
• High wealth: Not as much variety as medium wealth, but perfectly acceptable since there should be much less R$$$ in a well-balanced city and region.

Having worked on a similar project, I can attest to how difficult it is to cover all of your bases on a project like this, especially if you don't want some buildings sticking out due to wildly different coloring or scale from other BATs. That's something I discovered the hard way when trying to compile my own set. There were a number of BATs that seemed perfect when I looked at them in isolation, but when I grew them side-by-side (or tested how they looked side-by-side in PIM-X), I discovered I had to get rid of something like 50% of the BATs I picked out., 

I'll also quickly say that I'm not sure  you'll be able to cover all of the growth stages for each tileset if you're breaking things up into rural/urban/sprawl/modern. For example, I can't think of a way to make a stage 4+ lot that fits into a rural setting. Similarly, I don't think you'll be able to cover stage 1 R$ or stage 2 R$ of the New York tileset if you're relying on duplexes and other multi-unit structures -- those structures are simply too dense for the game's lowest growth stages. So, if you're using this scheme for your tilesets, I think it might be helpful to leave yourself some gaps.

I've already suggested it in a separate thread, but I'd strongly recommend A Field Guide to American Houses as reference material if you're diving in on this project. It's a comprehensive guide of US housing styles, and it's been a huge help for me in terms of distinguishing between different BATs and figuring out why certain BATs seem "American" at first glance, but don't seem to fit in naturally with other US-style BATs. The book also includes some really helpful information on how different types of US neighborhoods develop, including typical lot sizes, house orientations, yard setbacks, etc., which is invaluable for lotting.

[Indiana Joe 1,752]

15 hours ago, BartonThinks said:

I'll also quickly say that I'm not sure  you'll be able to cover all of the growth stages for each tileset

No doubt, stages are gonna get all flip-turned upside down, and on purpose.  For low density, all your stage 1 residential buildings get replaced as soon as your pop is above several hundred.  So it's impossible to have a trailer park, or really anything other than duplexes once your city grows.  Despite the greatness of the No-Kickout mod, stage upgrades still can't be stopped except by Make Historical.  That's why I separated those out.

For medium density, you can see here that my categories change.  Chicago and NY are pretty much going to be restricted to the lowest stage of Medium density.  Having this guy pop up in the middle of your row-houses kinda ruins the look.

They probably will change again for high density.  I won't have the ease of the original game, to "set-and-forget" your tileset and let residential supposedly naturally upgrade with your city.  There will certainly be 'gaps'; in exchange I get the control of knowing that only very specific types of buildings will appear.

 

I'm still not sure what to do with low density Euro $ and $$.  I don't really feel any need to split up rural houses any further, but I can't come up with a good split for suburban homes.  BAT architecture varies widely, and as you hinted at, different creators have clashing styles that don't sit adjacent very well; two different "southwestern ranch" homes might not go together at all.  A useful one might be lot style, i.e. forested vs open yards; but that can be hard to tell with some downloads without looking in a city first.  Also Cori's tree removal brush might be able to solve that.

[Cyclone Boom 17,031]

14 minutes ago, Indiana Joe said:

Also Cori's tree removal brush might be able to solve that.

For anyone interested, here it is...

Cori's God Mode Flora Eraser 

(Then scroll down for the v1.1 version, and posts below for extra details.)

[kschmidt 6,214]

On 11-7-2021 at 10:48 PM, Indiana Joe said:

Alright I've jumped off the deep end.  I want to customize every single tile set, for the ultimate amount of control.

Here's the beginning of an outline for low density, with Maxis examples.  For much of this density, the setting is what really matters more to me than the architecture, since I want it all to look North American anyway.

 

And then I have a spreadsheet for custom content links, based on what might fit where.

 

...which you can view here.

 

But oh, if only it were so easy.  You browse the exchanges, you find an awesome BAT...and it just doesn't fall into your categories neatly.  Not to mention how unbalanced the available variety is:

• Low wealth: severely lacking.  Mostly falls into the low-density "rural" category. R$ small-medium density is needed.  I may need to re-assign some existing BATs.
• Medium wealth: hugely over-saturated.  Very difficult to split up.
• High wealth: Not as much variety as medium wealth, but perfectly acceptable since there should be much less R$$$ in a well-balanced city and region.

Say, instead of adjusting a series of Bat´s to fit into a certain tile set replacing the standard tile set with your custom sets. Some controll for standard growing sets, it will be your personal set I think this will cause prblems if u use them with tileset depended Bat´s these becoming to unusable  in the game. Houston set maybe the more rural orientated than chicago set. Growth stages I rather recomend to have a look at integrating CAM into the standard growht stages setup. Any tileset change or adjusting linked  bat´s for some instances it´s up to the creators to determine, it´s there work. Growing stages as determined by the architect tools preferences, it´s all unnecesary as you can grow any thing you like. As far as determine or conrol wich growths a stingent seperated system of userDir installantions and hard choice wich to use is a proces of longterm shifting adding delete want you don´t want, to reach for the ultimate plugins folder !

Sincerely yours,

Kschmidt

 

[BartonThinks 3,416]

4 hours ago, Indiana Joe said:

No doubt, stages are gonna get all flip-turned upside down, and on purpose.  For low density, all your stage 1 residential buildings get replaced as soon as your pop is above several hundred.  So it's impossible to have a trailer park, or really anything other than duplexes once your city grows.  Despite the greatness of the No-Kickout mod, stage upgrades still can't be stopped except by Make Historical.  That's why I separated those out.

For medium density, you can see here that my categories change.  Chicago and NY are pretty much going to be restricted to the lowest stage of Medium density.  Having this guy pop up in the middle of your row-houses kinda ruins the look.

They probably will change again for high density.  I won't have the ease of the original game, to "set-and-forget" your tileset and let residential supposedly naturally upgrade with your city.  There will certainly be 'gaps'; in exchange I get the control of knowing that only very specific types of buildings will appear.

 

I'm still not sure what to do with low density Euro $ and $$.  I don't really feel any need to split up rural houses any further, but I can't come up with a good split for suburban homes.  BAT architecture varies widely, and as you hinted at, different creators have clashing styles that don't sit adjacent very well; two different "southwestern ranch" homes might not go together at all.  A useful one might be lot style, i.e. forested vs open yards; but that can be hard to tell with some downloads without looking in a city first.  Also Cori's tree removal brush might be able to solve that.

Even if you can find consistently modeled BATs, I think you'll probably want to re-lot a significant number of these buildings. In some cases, you'll need to re-lot them so that they fit your preferred growth stages without completely mucking up the game's growth stage curves. In other cases, you'll probably want to relot buildings that use unconventional lot patterns or a lotting style that doesn't fit in with the rest of your lots. Lotting styles can vary even more than BATing styles, and it's particularly noticeable in low-density areas. I know relotting can be a lot of work, but I'm sure it would take less time than trying to create a seamless plugins folder using "as-is" lots.

Also, out of curiosity -- if the Chicago and NY tilesets are going to be capped at stage 4, which tilesets would you be using for taller apartment buildings? It doesn't seem like they would fit into suburban sprawl environments, and most of the existing Chi & NY apartment buildings aren't particularly modern or European.

As a thought, if you're modding tilesets in the first place, one thing you could do is use medium/high-density zoning to further restrict what grows where. For example, you could set all of the larger apartment buildings that you don't want growing in rowhouse neighborhoods so that they only grow in high density areas. You can do this even if the lot's growth stage would normally allow for mid-density growth. That is, you could take a building like "Ingebretson Place" and set the lot so that it only grows in high-density areas, even though the lot itself is stage 5. This was a trick that I saw CP discussing in his SC4D thread, where he had some low-density lots that would only grow on medium-density zones, which allowed him to control which types of lots grew in which area.

[CorinaMarie 29,882]

5 hours ago, Indiana Joe said:

Also Cori's tree removal brush might be able to solve that.

One note about that: The sample @Cyclone Boom showed removing trees from grown lots was in a neighborhood where the ground is 100% perfectly flat.

If there are undulations in the terrain, you might destroy the buildings.

Save immediately before testing my brush for that.

[BartonThinks 3,416]

5 minutes ago, CorinaMarie said:

One note about that: The sample @Cyclone Boom showed removing trees from grown lots was in a neighborhood where the ground is 100% perfectly flat.

If there are undulations in the terrain, you might destroy the buildings.

Save immediately before testing my brush for that.

Am I correct that the eraser only works on flora (e.g., god-mode trees and MMPs)?

The reason I ask is that most lotters use props for trees instead of flora. So if the goal is an easy way to remove trees from existing lots, the eraser would need to remove props.

[CorinaMarie 29,882]

8 minutes ago, BartonThinks said:

Am I correct that the eraser only works on flora (e.g., god-mode trees and MMPs)?

Yes. And as best I can tell it's not perfect even for that purpose. It wasn't created for such, but that is an interesting side effect CB found.

Before:

 

After:

[Indiana Joe 1,752]

4 hours ago, kschmidt said:

Say, instead of adjusting a series of Bat´s to fit into a certain tile set replacing the standard tile set with your custom sets. Some controll for standard growing sets, it will be your personal set I think this will cause prblems if u use them with tileset depended Bat´s these becoming to unusable  in the game. Houston set maybe the more rural orientated than chicago set. Growth stages I rather recomend to have a look at integrating CAM into the standard growht stages setup. Any tileset change or adjusting linked  bat´s for some instances it´s up to the creators to determine, it´s there work. Growing stages as determined by the architect tools preferences, it´s all unnecesary as you can grow any thing you like. As far as determine or conrol wich growths a stingent seperated system of userDir installantions and hard choice wich to use is a proces of longterm shifting adding delete want you don´t want, to reach for the ultimate plugins folder !

 

Luckily changing a BAT's tileset is a quick and easy edit with the Reader 

 

And I've already found it to be quite effective at the intended purpose in-game, as we see in this city of 30,000 sims.

 

As for changing directories in the plugins folder, that's exactly the kind of thing I am doing everything to avoid.  I'm trying to squeeze the maximum amount of customizability out of a plugins folder without quitting the game periodically to move files around.  Besides, setting up BATs to do this is significantly more work than changing the tilesets.  If I want to be able to load into every city, I need a custom DESC file for each one that prevents it from growing while allowing the lot to show up.

[Kloudkicker 4,565]

36 minutes ago, CorinaMarie said:

After:

I noticed the tall palms along the road disappeared and are the short versions now. Are those re-growing after using the flora eraser on the lots nearby?

[CorinaMarie 29,882]

1 minute ago, Kloudkicker said:

I noticed the tall palms along the road disappeared and are the short versions now. Are those re-growing after using the flora eraser on the lots nearby?

While using the brush, it destroyed a lot of the gravel roads so when I re-drew those they get random new trees.

[Indiana Joe 1,752]

2 hours ago, BartonThinks said:

I know relotting can be a lot of work, but I'm sure it would take less time than trying to create a seamless plugins folder using "as-is" lots.

Nah, that's way too much work.  I've got hundreds of BATs in the folder already, and I'm not even done with low density R$.  It won't be seamless but I'm going to hack and slash it together as best I can.

2 hours ago, BartonThinks said:

Also, out of curiosity -- if the Chicago and NY tilesets are going to be capped at stage 4, which tilesets would you be using for taller apartment buildings? It doesn't seem like they would fit into suburban sprawl environments, and most of the existing Chi & NY apartment buildings aren't particularly modern or European.

As a thought, if you're modding tilesets in the first place, one thing you could do is use medium/high-density zoning to further restrict what grows where. For example, you could set all of the larger apartment buildings that you don't want growing in rowhouse neighborhoods so that they only grow in high density areas.

For the second part, that's sort of the plan already.  Some taller stuff is going to get pushed off to high density, as medium density is way over-saturated.  With existing BATs (and even with Maxis) it currently covers townhomes up to anything smaller than a skyscraper.

For medium density, this is currently the working (fluid) plan:

New York basically remains the same vanilla tileset for this density, just a focus on wall-to-wall and low or mid-rises.  Houston could be as tall as they want, but the theme is a large, spread out lot, with long spread out buildings.  I know lot sizes could potentially be used as a separator here, but buildings that still fit into this style on small lots will go here too.

Anything with a small footprint that doesn't fit in anywhere else is gonna get tossed into Euro.

 

2 hours ago, BartonThinks said:

That is, you could take a building like "Ingebretson Place" and set the lot so that it only grows in high-density areas, even though the lot itself is stage 5. This was a trick that I saw CP discussing in his SC4D thread, where he had some low-density lots that would only grow on medium-density zones, which allowed him to control which types of lots grew in which area.

 

But now this might be an interesting thread to pull on.  I never thought of using medium and high density in this way.  This could effectively give 8 new tilesets to low density, and 4 to medium, if I understand it correctly.  Now, those sets could only be used in a city tile below a certain population, otherwise you'll get higher stage buildings.  Actually there is an important question there: will medium and high density zones develop at all, if the population threshold is too low?  I can't quite remember, but I believe they will indeed fill in with lower stages.

This could be an interesting one to experiment with.  I really appreciate the discussion here 

[BartonThinks 3,416]

1 minute ago, Indiana Joe said:

Nah, that's way too much work.  I've got hundreds of BATs in the folder already, and I'm not even done with low density R$.  It won't be seamless but I'm going to hack and slash it together as best I can.

For the second part, that's sort of the plan already.  Some taller stuff is going to get pushed off to high density, as medium density is way over-saturated.  With existing BATs (and even with Maxis) it currently covers townhomes up to anything smaller than a skyscraper.

For medium density, this was the working plan:

 

 

 

But now this might be an interesting thread to pull on.  I never thought of using medium and high density in this way.  This could effectively give 8 new tilesets to low density, and 4 to medium, if I understand it correctly.  Now, those sets could only be used in a city tile below a certain population, otherwise you'll get higher stage buildings.  Actually there is an important question there: will medium and high density zones develop at all, if the population threshold is too low?  I can't quite remember, but I believe they will indeed fill in with lower stages.

This could be an interesting one to experiment with.

The CAM documentation and support threads over on SC4D should include charts showing which stages get built under which conditions. One important point is that stages are largely determined by regional population/jobs, not city capacity.

As far as using medium-density and high-density for restrictive zoning, it depends on how you set things up. You could technically take a Stage 1 lot with a tiny trailer and set it so it will only grow on high-density zones, for example. You could also set it so that it only grows on low-density zones (e.g., it will never grow on a medium density zone -- however, this means the lot will be destroyed if you upzone from low-density do medium-density).

Theoretically, you could use this to set up 12 distinct low-density tilesets. As you said, medium density or high density lots could overtake areas zoned for medium/high density. One workaround would be to just leave these areas without water service, since mid-density and high-density lots require water access.

[Propfam 2,303]

5 minutes ago, BartonThinks said:

One workaround would be to just leave these areas without water service, since mid-density and high-density lots require water access.

And it's quite realistic too. Sure they still need water in RL but you don't need to use public water services. You just bore the ground to get water.

[Indiana Joe 1,752]

2 minutes ago, BartonThinks said:

stages are largely determined by regional population/jobs

Oof, how could I forget about that one.   Time for some sleep I think.

4 minutes ago, BartonThinks said:

One workaround would be to just leave these areas without water service, since mid-density and high-density lots require water access.

I wasn't sure if the water requirement only applied to those higher stage lots, or if the zones needed water to develop anything at all.  Provided it's indeed the former, that would work very effectively to give 8 new tile sets each for R$ and R$$.

I'll come back to this one tomorrow or perhaps later due to work.  This is definitely worth testing out.

[twalsh102 1,601]

According to the Prima Guide, it's not zone density that determines the requirement for water, but rather wealth-level.

No high-wealth development of any developer type will occur without water.

Low- and medium-wealth Residential and Commercial will develop to Growth Stage 3 without water.

IR will develop to Growth Stage 3 without water (CAM changes this to Stage 2). ID and IM will develop only to Growth Stage 1 without water.

These Growth Stage Caps are set in the Developer Exemplars (the same exemplars that define the Growth Stage thresholds and percentages)

[rsc204 21,866]

6 hours ago, twalsh102 said:

According to the Prima Guide, it's not zone density that determines the requirement for water, but rather wealth-level.

The Prima Guide has often been known to be just plain wrong, Mid and High rise developments simply don't happen without water for example. That said, such developments would be beyond Growth Stage 3, so perhaps the information is just poorly presented rather than a factual error.

[Propfam 2,303]

17 hours ago, rsc204 said:

The Prima Guide has often been known to be just plain wrong, Mid and High rise developments simply don't happen without water for example. That said, such developments would be beyond Growth Stage 3, so perhaps the information is just poorly presented rather than a factual error.

More like both. You can't grow R$$ and R$$$ at all without water (except using HowDryIam). At the same time, you'll eventually need water for R$ to advance the density. Another example would be industry. You can't grow I-HT without water and you can barely grow I-D and I-M without water. And to advance to higher stages, you have to supply water to I-R.

On 13/7/2021 at 7:24 AM, BartonThinks said:

That is, you could take a building like "Ingebretson Place" and set the lot so that it only grows in high-density areas, even though the lot itself is stage 5. This was a trick that I saw CP discussing in his SC4D thread, where he had some low-density lots that would only grow on medium-density zones, which allowed him to control which types of lots grew in which area.

I've never done any changes to density aside from changing the stage. But IRM does that trick with dirty (mid-dense) and clean (hi-dense) zoning. I-D always tossed to mid-dense. I-M got split into either mid-dense or hi-dense depending on their pollution, not the growth stage. I-HT always tossed to hi-dense. I forgot if the clean zoning requires water, though.

Personally, I'll use blockers and bypasses (easy to make by using Reader's Navigator) to get buildings I want. Even I can make bypasses for just one building and the rest are blocked. Not the best solution in terms of diversity but I can always add it later, or I can use it in certain area and then I remove that bypass and replaced with other.

Edit: I was a bit wrong, though. Thanks @BartonThinks!

[BartonThinks 3,416]

2 hours ago, chfzdn said:

More like both. You can't grow R$$ and R$$$ at all without water (except using HowDryIam). At the same time, you'll eventually need water for R$ to advance the density. Another example would be industry. You can't grow I-HT without water and you can barely grow I-D and I-M without water. And to advance to higher stages, you have to supply water to I-R.

That's incorrect about R$$. The water supply cap for both R$ and R$$ is set at stage 3, which means both R$ and R$$ lots from stages 1, 2, and 3 can grow without water access. I did forget that R$$$ lots require water, though.

FWIW, the water supply cap for each developer is as follows. If a developer has a "Stage 0" water supply cap, it means that no lots in that class can grow without being supplied water. Bear in mind that residential and commercial buildings can have eight growth stages in the base game (with stages 1, 2, and 3 covering low density) while industrial lots only have three growth stages.

R$: Stage 3
R$$: Stage 3
R$$$: Stage 0

CS$: Stage 3
CS$$: Stage 3
CS$$$: Stage 0

CO$$: Stage 3
CO$$$: Stage 0

IR: Stage 3
ID: Stage 1
IM: Stage 1
IHT: Stage 0

So the only RCI categories that cannot grow without water access at any growth stage are R$$$, CS$$$, CO$$$, and IHT.

If you're not seeing any R$$ homes develop in areas without water supply access, that's probably due to the desirability being low in these areas.

[Jasoncw 11,949]

So I want to plug the idea I've had in case someone who knows what they're doing sees it can do something with it.

My understanding (I've never actually tested it and I don't remember where I read it) is that if you delete the property in a lot which controls what density the lot grows on, the game will default to a density based on the stage of the lot. So without that property, a stage 8 lot will grow on high density zones.

What I'd like is a .dll that overwrites which stages default to which densities, so that we can remap the stages to different densities. This could also be useful in combination with the discovery that there are unused zones (hypothetically being able to make things like "very low/rural density" or "very high density"). Ideally the .dll would either be editable or look at a text file or something that would allow players to individually assign stages to zones.

Medium density residential in SC4 is basically Manhattan. High density residential in SC4 is basically Hong Kong, but even in Hong Kong many of the big apartment tower complexes are still not big enough to be high density. These are very exceptional places. For the US, low density are big suburban lots and rural lots, medium density is tightly packed single family houses and rowhouses, and high density are apartment midrises. And depending on what kinds of cities people are making, "high density" could be the two story general store in a small town, which is why I think the user being able to edit it would be nice.

[BartonThinks 3,416]

1 hour ago, Jasoncw said:

This could also be useful in combination with the discovery that there are unused zones (hypothetically being able to make things like "very low/rural density" or "very high density").

Wait, is this an actual discovery someone made? This is (mind-melting) news to me.

Regarding the rest of your post -- Does this mean that the dll would also instruct the game to ignore the "LotConfigPropertyZoneTypes" property completely, i.e., treat each lot as if it doesn't have this property? Or would you also require a separate way to delete this property from all of the lots in a given user's plugins folder?

It would be interesting to pair something like this with some of the CAM 2.1.0 play-style variants. There's a rural play style controller that stretches out the stages and encourages lower density growth compared to the base game. It seems like it would be a great match for something like this.

[CorinaMarie 29,882]

8 hours ago, BartonThinks said:

Wait, is this an actual discovery someone made? This is (mind-melting) news to me.

Yes, @simmaster07 created a DLL which enables Military, Airport, Seaport, and Spaceport zoning.

As explained in his notes, they don't do anything, but do allow you to draw out other colored zones.

While I've never tested it, it does seem like it might be possible to create all the related exemplars which could possibly enable things to grow in these zones. There are a few dozen which would all need set up and there's no guarantee that the .exe doesn't ignore them. It'd be a ton of work just to find out.

[Indiana Joe 1,752]

Awesome discussion going on in here as usual.

Same as what Cori has said, but to sum it up, the outlook for 1. truly functional extra tile sets and 2. extra zone types is: prolly ain't gonna happen.  Although they can technically be enabled, there's no practical way for me to use them in normal gameplay.  I'm not going to hold my breath having read through the development of those by Cori and Simmaster.

 

Restricting lower-stage lots to higher zones is however very practical, and I thank Barton again for pointing out that this has been used by Cycledogg in the past.  Instead of using it for 12 low-density tilesets, I think 8 is good--spread across low/medium density.  Likewise, 8 medium-density tilesets spread across medium and high density.  In the latter case I think I can use the small lot sizes of rowhomes to keep high stage buildings from appearing despite having water.

Visuals are my favorite, so here we go:

 

Speaking of visuals, I was trying to wrap my head around the 37 BATs and house packs I found and liked for low-wealth residential, plus all the Maxis homes.  Plopping thumbnail pictures of all of them into a folder and sorting them visually helped immensely in getting 8 groups that should look good together in the game:

 

Because as Barton said, trying to shoehorn stuff into an ideal category wasn't going to work.  Easier to take what's available and sort it.  Lot style affects it as much if not more than building architecture.

 

Matt

[BartonThinks 3,416]

10 minutes ago, Indiana Joe said:

Awesome discussion going on in here as usual.

Same as what Cori has said, but to sum it up, the outlook for 1. truly functional extra tile sets and 2. extra zone types is: prolly ain't gonna happen.  Although they can technically be enabled, there's no practical way for me to use them in normal gameplay.  I'm not going to hold my breath having read through the development of those by Cori and Simmaster.

 

Restricting lower-stage lots to higher zones is however very practical, and I thank Barton again for pointing out that this has been used by Cycledogg in the past.  Instead of using it for 12 low-density tilesets, I think 8 is good--spread across low/medium density.  Likewise, 8 medium-density tilesets spread across medium and high density.  In the latter case I think I can use the small lot sizes of rowhomes to keep high stage buildings from appearing despite having water.

Visuals are my favorite, so here we go:

 

Speaking of visuals, I was trying to wrap my head around the 37 BATs and house packs I found and liked for low-wealth residential, plus all the Maxis homes.  Plopping thumbnail pictures of all of them into a folder and sorting them visually helped immensely in getting 8 groups that should look good together in the game:

 

Because as Barton said, trying to shoehorn stuff into an ideal category wasn't going to work.  Easier to take what's available and sort it.  Lot style affects it as much if not more than building architecture.

 

Matt

One thing I would also recommend is plopping some of the existing lots from each set side by side in a blank city tile using the LotPlop cheat. In addition to helping you compare lot styles, this would be helpful for weeding out buildings that are dramatically oversized or undersized compared to other BATs. For example, most of Simgoober's homes are scaled larger than other BATs, and there are a few of his houses where it's really pronounced (e.g. The Susan B Anthony house, which makes some other homes look like monopoly tokens).

[Max4k 727]

Took me about a year of searching and have lot of great unique stuff.  It's baffling to me how this game actually still runs with all this stuff. No park menu lag either.

Here is my Ultimate Plugin Folder.   I've got Colossus Addon Mod w/ Rural install version.    Things are broken down before going into Plugin directory.

2 folders are  _Pre-Data Pack for going to Plugins and _Removed Plugins that is stuff that was sorted out and don't need, or may use down the road.

 

LINKS ARE READ ONLY  >  I used Snap2HTML to show how folders look and what plugins I have

#1 - This link shows before everything is sorted.  BSC-1 , I don't fully pack everything and photo below show 3 folders that are not Datpacked.    NAMES-1 though -5, I sort the names broken down,  and like Transportation-1 , will show things broken down in 2nd link

 

https://7dust.net/SC4K/Plugins/__Pre-DataPack-A.html#

 

#2 - This link shows how everything is sorted before I Datpack, and the photos below show how the Plugin directory looks when done. 

 

https://7dust.net/SC4K/Plugins/__Pre-DataPack-B.html#

 

 

 

[Indiana Joe 1,752]

Added a disclaimer at the top for PEG content and its occasional compatibility issues.  Hopefully will make newcomers aware and able to avoid problems.  It has only came up once, recently, since I wrote the guide.

I had not thought about it in a long time, but I do seem to recall some controversy back in the day.  In general it's iconic, quality content.  The team was just interested in doing their own thing, with their own rural plugin-verse.  Fortunately the incompatibilities are generally rare.

Matt

[Max4k 727]

I'm actually one of the few people that use CAM and SPAM farm, but I completely stripped out the core SPAM stuff to produce any SPAM farms and have not seen any issues with CAM Farms.

The only major issue with PEG that I had so far was known issue and required some patch and resolved issue.

[Indiana Joe 1,752]

Welcome weary readers in 2023 and beyond.  As time marches on, the community for this 20 year old computer game dwindles but survives.  Perhaps there are yet those who are newly discovering and downloading the amazing custom content users have poured their effort into for 2 decades.

 

With the shutdown of the BSC Lot Exchange (the LEX formerly at SC4Devotion.com), a huge blow is dealt to the archive of SimCity 4 mods.  As Alex (Tarkus) said, there were over 4,000 files hosted there, and many were not available here on Simtropolis.  This also created tremendous link rot for my list here of some 250+ content creators and files.  Some of the most important ones -- such as the entire BSC dependency collection -- have been quickly replaced on Tarkus's new site, SC4Evermore.com.  Amusingly enough it took the crash of the entire website to do something fairly simple that was a very contentious point for years: combine all those dependencies into one file.  I can't emphasize enough how much this community owes to Alex who, on top of coordinating the Network Addon Mod for the last decade or so, took over the second largest fan and content site in the community, and is now trying to save its content from the oblivion of time.

 

Who knows how long it will take until all of that content is available again.  In the meantime, unlike my introduction to this thread from 2018 states, it is a sad time in the community and not a good one to be building a plugins folder.  One day perhaps I can go back and replace every LEX link here with a SC4E link, and I hope I'm still around here to do so.

 

One day I know I will log off for the last time, like so many others already have.  I want to thank everyone who I've ever interacted with here in the community, even 15-odd years ago when I was a kid and probably less-than-eloquently spoken (sorry ).  I know Discord is the spiritual successor in many ways, but as far as website forums go, Simtropolis is pretty much the last place left.  An era coming to an end.  We've been around a long time; a few of you dinosaurs even from the 2003 days ().  Hell, we've been around so long that the sequel to our beloved game launched, flopped, and was forgotten; our beloved resident grumpy old man died; and our beloved, benevolent, administrative beacon-of-positivity tried to end it all.  Everyone here who ever contributed anything, no matter how small: thanks for stopping by.  Whether or not you realize, you were a part of something amazing.

 

Last but not least thank you Dirk for making it all possible.

 

Matt